Candle Scene Shot Breakdown

Created Using Maya
Rendered in Mental Ray

Responsible For:
All Assets

This scene was created using Maya and rendered
in 1 Pass using Mental Ray. Final Gather and
Global Illumination were not used for this scene.

The idea for this scene revolved around showing realistic lighting for fire, and as a personal first attempt, I decided to tackle a candle flame first.

The candle flame shader was based on this tutorial. For my scene I chose to control the attributes with ramp materials instead of animation curves.

The animation of the flame was done dynamically with a newton field for each flame and a turbulence field that effects all the flames. The position of each newton fields is controlled with expressions to create random movement around the base of the flame. This pulls the soft body particles in random directions around the base of the flame. The influence on each particle increases as they approach the tip of the flame. The size of the flame also varies because the goal of the soft body is randomly scaled up and down.

The lighting from each flame is a point light that has it's position controlled through expressions to be equal
to a fraction of the newton fields around each flame. To account for the lag in particle movement, the light is connected through a frame cache node so that it actually follows the newtonian fields and stays with the soft body flame. The brightness of the flame varies proportionally with the amount the goal is scaled. This is also connected through a frame cache node to account for the lag in scaling.